You can’t experience true financial freedom if you constantly desire more stuff. By contentment, I don’t mean just accepting your lot in life and learning to live with it. Contentment is more of an attitude of satisfaction with our situation. No matter the situation, be it extreme poverty or wealth, there isn’t the urge to obtain material things. It’s a good thing to be content with what you have without the desire to gain more. Of course, taken to the […]

There is an old rule I inadvertently use and I’m not sure where it came from. It’s the idea to, ‘Never pay retail.’ Retail prices are full market prices without any discounts. Sometimes paying retail is unavoidable. Some things like government fees can’t be negotiated. In most cases you can easily get away from the retail scam. If you pay retail you are paying too much. The shops usually price according to what they consider they will use as […]

We were looking to buy a property with as many bedrooms as possible to rent it out room by room. Most people were directing us to 3 bedroom properties to invest in. That seemed to be what everyone was doing. We, however, wanted a better result than what everyone else was getting. We had just missed out on a seven bedroom property and were about to give up when we came across another property that was marketed as a […]

When renovating a house I always like to try to save money wherever possible. If I can do a job myself to save I money, I’ll give it a go (the end result may not look any good, but at least I saved money, right?). There are things that I won’t try. Electrical or plumbing can cause some serious disruption if you get it wrong. It can also be illegal for schmucks to fiddle with (or you could die). Things […]

My wife and I were conducting a financial workshop at a university a few months ago. One of the questions I asked was, “Is a student loan good debt or bad debt?” Some said that it was good debt because the end result was getting a degree, which would land them a job. Another person said that it was necessary debt, because how else would they get a degree? I told them it was bad debt. By the look on […]

Click Here to Get the Book I reached financial freedom a few years back and I have written a book about it. I thought the book was pretty good, but it was terrible. It was all over the place. There were redundant sentences, bad grammar and rubbish dressed up to sound like something useful. All in all, it wasn’t good enough to throw in the trash can. What to do? Give up? Pay someone to do it for me? […]

I used to work as a Postie (Postman) and had to get up pretty early. It only took me around 5 mins to get there from where I lived, as there was no traffic that time of the morning. You would go in pick up your mail, sort it and bundle it up, ready for delivery. Then you would head outside on the bike to deliver the mail, getting paid to do exercise. If you finished early (which I almost […]

When we were in Brisbane last year I bought a vehicle for the family. It was nothing flash, just something to get us around. I didn’t really make sure that it was all running smooth. I was not sure how long we were going to be in Brisbane and I wanted to get something quickly. When driving it I noticed that it idled rough when in drive and stationary, it shook big time. I hoped it wasn’t something major and […]

We had been invited to lunch. This was a normal experience for us to be invited out for lunch in China. It was a really nice restaurant and the dishes were good without being memorable. Then a dish came out with some mystery looking meat and there were bits covering parts of it. As it got closer I could see that those bits were scorpions. There must have been like 20 or so scorpions on that dish. I had never […]

A lot of people would call us frugal. That would be true. Sometimes it was embarrassingly true. I won’t go into all the details here. Suffice to say that we try to save money wherever we can. That sometimes might make people feel a bit uncomfortable (I can’t think of any specific examples). We don’t follow the norm when it comes to spending at all. That does not mean we are cheap. We go out of our way to save […]